What is the role of Google's Fred update?

[FidaChoudhary]

What is the role of Google's Fred update?

[RH-Calvin]

"Fred" is just a humorous euphemism that Googler Gary Illyes made up on the spot when pressed for a name for an unconfirmed, hypothetical update that a small percentage of (mostly) aggressive Web marketers attributed to March 7, 2017 or thereabouts.

[AaliyaAnubhav]

This update is not officially introduced by Google. However Research on Internet says it is penalising those website which have many unnecessary Ads, those ADs do not let people read the content.

Thin Content is also a concern when we talk about Google Fred. The Website must not have thing content.

[vickyciky]

Google Fred is an algorithm update that targets black-hat techniques tied to the content sites that have a lot of ads and seem to have been created for the purpose of generating revenue over solving a user's problem.

[swikriti.sharma09]

Google Fred Update was targeted at those sites who involved in making revenue using too many affilaite links and having very low quality or thin content. Such sites got affected by Fred Update. This update was named as Fred by Gary  Illyes

The sites which involved into such kind of activities, i.e ad heavy websites with low quality content got affected by this update and their rankings dropped heavily.

[KyraKakkar]

Google rolled out what appeared to be a major update, with reports of widespread impacts across the SEO community. Gary Illyes jokingly referred to is as "Fred", and the name stuck, but he later made it clear that this was not an official confirmation.

[jeffmarlon]

It is nothing but a rumor. On 8th March 2017, All the webmasters of the world faced major shuffling in Google search results in which it was noticed that rankings of major websites were shaked. So, a common thought was assumed that it is some kind of any update of Google Algorithm. It was named "Fred" because a Google's employee Gary Illyes said that from now on, all updates of Google would be named as "Fred". He jokingly said it.

[Sojan Babu]

Google Fred is an algorithm update that targets black-hat tactics tied to aggressive monetization. This includes an overload on ads, low-value content, and little-added user benefits. This does not mean all sites hit by the Google Fred update are dummy sites created for ad revenue, but the majority of websites affected were content sites that have a lot of ads and seem to have been created for the purpose of generating revenue over solving a user's problem.

[ZoyaBhatt]

The latest Google Fred update has to do with penalizing content driven sites that are too inundated with ads and motivated by driving ad revenue where they become troublesome for users trying to view content.

Essentially, content url's that placed generating ad revenue over solving user problems are in jeopardy of being hit with the penalty. Some sites reported over a 50% drop in traffic due to the penalty.

As the above mentioned article states, this hasn't been confirmed by Google, but based on the data the writer was given, it seems plausible that this is the case.

[KyraKakkar]

The truth is, nobody knows what the Google Fred update is all about. We have some guesses, but they're far from complete. At this point, I would recommend not doing anything. Don't take any action for a minimum of 20 days.